In Another Time by Caroline Leech
Publisher / Year: HarperTeen - August 2018
Genre: Historical Fiction
I'm so excited to
welcome back author Caroline Leech today. Caroline is the author of
Wait for Me and
In Another Time.
Both novels are set in Scotland during World War II.
Wait for Me was one of my
favorite debuts last year, and I was so happy to be back in Caroline's capable hands for another wartime story
set in Scotland.
In Another Time is about Maisie McCall who joins the war effort as a lumberjill with the Women's Timber Corps. Stationed in the wilds
of Scotland, Maisie's company works alongside the Newfoundland Overseas
Forestry Unit, and Maisie grows especially close to one member of NOFU,
John Lindsay. Today for World
War II Wednesday Caroline shares some of the adventures she had
researching her newest book.
How to Write About a Nice Cup of Tea
One of the biggest challenges to face any author of
historical fiction is how to create a very personal and emotional connection
between the reader and someone who lived in another place and in another time .
. . Hmmm, in another time, that
sounds familiar…
My second novel, IN ANOTHER TIME, takes readers back again
to Scotland during World War Two. As with WAIT FOR ME, my debut novel of last
year, I wanted to tell a story about how much wartime changed lives, even for
those people who stayed far away from the battlefront. And there weren’t many places
further from the heat of battle, both geographically and spiritually, than the
ancient forests of the Scottish Highlands. That’s where we first find
17-year-old Maisie McCall, as she puts down her 6lb axe and studies the
bleeding blisters on her hands. Instead of going back to school after the
summer, Maisie has left home to become a lumberjill.
Until an author friend sent me a link to a newspaper article
with a note which simply said, “Did you know women chopped down trees during
the war?” I knew absolutely nothing about the lumberjills. But as soon as she
said that word, I was hooked, and I started delving into history. The Research
Phase of the book began.
In 1942, the British government announced the formation of
the Women’s Timber Corps (WTC). Because German submarines were consistently
targeting shipping convoys bringing vital supplies, such as timber, into
Britain, the country needed to turn to its own home-grown resources instead.
However, because so many of the foresters—traditionally a male occupation—had
joined up to fight, the Home Secretary instead put a call out to women to take
their places. As a result, more than 5,000 women joined the Women’s Timber
Corps in Scotland, many of them coming from city jobs as secretaries and shop
girls—or in Maisie’s case, straight from school—to take on heavy physical work
in the woods with axes, saws and chains. They also worked with huge carthorses
and in sawmills, drove logging trucks and loaded trains. The lumberjills were
given just six weeks’ training before being posted to a WTC camp somewhere in
Scotland. These camps were often remote and rudimentary, and the girls often
had to endure dreadful weather conditions because the Scottish winter (and even
the summer too!) can be brutal. Many of them worked in the woods for four
years, through the end of the war, until the disbandment of the Corps in 1946.
Many of the lumberjills’ memories have been collected and
shared online and in wonderful books such as Affleck Gray’s
Timber! and Mairi Stewart’s
Voices of the Forest, and as I read
them, one theme really stood out, and that was friendship.
These women got only one week’s leave each
year, and so their fellow lumberjills really became their family. Many of the
friendships made in the camps lasted all their lives, and that’s a long time—if
17-year-old Maisie had been alive today, she would have been 93 years old.
I was very lucky last summer to get to meet and talk to a
former lumberjill about such friendships. At 19, Christina Edgar joined the
WTC, bored with being an office clerk and looking to do her bit for the war
effort. She was posted to a camp near
Dundee until the end of the war when she returned home to Glasgow where she
married, strange but true, Jim Forrester.
Mrs. Forrester, who has just celebrated her 95th birthday, came to
meet me at the Lumberjills Memorial Statue near Aberfoyle, which was finally
erected in 2007 after a long campaign for the WTC to be officially recognized
for its war service. As we sat at the bronze lumberjill’s feet, looking out
over the gloriously wooded hills of the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, she told
me stories about her WTC friends. She also remembered the other foresters they
worked with, some German and Italian prisoners from nearby POW camps, and also
the men of the Canadian Forestry Corps and the Newfoundland Overseas Forestry
Unit (NOFU).
Of course, I already knew about the NOFU lumberjacks from
all my digging around (what did authors ever do without the internet and a
top-notch library service?). In fact, the moment I first discovered that 3,500
Newfoundland lumberjacks had volunteered to work in Scotland, my own plot
development suddenly took off. I write love stories after all! But in
introducing the handsome, if enigmatic, John Lindsay into Maisie’s story, I
wasn’t straying too far from reality. Many of the lumberjills became
romantically involved with the lumberjacks they worked with, and quite a few
ended up marrying them after the war and returning to Newfoundland and Canada
afterwards as war brides.
But in IN ANOTHER TIME, Maisie quickly realizes that John
Lindsay is not what she would ever have expected a lumberjack to be. For one
thing, he writes poetry, but also, no matter how close she gets to him, she’s
sure that there’s even more that he’s hiding from her. So, while Maisie tries
to find the real John—and how the war has torn his life apart—she ends up
discovering more about herself than she could ever have imagined.
But back to that challenge I mentioned up above. Once my
Research Phase was well underway (and to be honest, research never really comes
to an end—even after the book is published, I’m still finding out interesting
things about the lumberjills!) I faced the problem of how to create a story
which would connect the reader, personally and emotionally, to a character
living in another place and in another time in history. I certainly needed to
do that without sounding like a school textbook reciting dates and places of
important battles, and names of important men who had signed important
documents. To my mind, fiction is there to tell the story behind the textbooks
and the newspaper headlines. Historical novels tell the story of fictional
people who live their lives within factual events, and even though they are imaginary,
if the period has been researched and written well, their stories will shed a
bright light on the truth of history, even if the stories themselves aren’t
actually true.
One of the ways I try to create this connection between a
character and a reader is to write about the fine details of their life, the
small things that are familiar to any reader, like the yearning for a long hot
bath with lovely scented soap after a long day of hard work. But then I
counteract that with the thing that makes my character’s life so different,
like the fact that in wartime, both soap and water were rationed. Maisie was
entitled to just five inches of hot bathwater
each week, and the only soap she’d have been able to buy using her
ration book was carbolic—harsh, pink and sold in utilitarian blocks. Or, in my
first book, WAIT FOR ME, perhaps the reader finds their mouth watering at
Lorna’s plan to have a piece of cake and a nice cup of tea, except that 1945,
the cake would have been made using powdered eggs, not fresh, and with almost
no sugar (should that even have been called ‘cake’, I wonder?) because of food
rationing. To make matters worse, the tea leaves she would have used were
almost certainly on their fourth, fifth or even sixth use because rationing had
also been introduced for tea, as well as meat, cheese, fruit and eventually
even for bread.
Personal relationships too must be written in a way that is
familiar to the reader, while also being so different. In wartime, all
relationships were put under immense strain, which is undoubtedly why so many
historical authors set their stories during or in the immediate aftermath of
wars or conflicts. In WAIT FOR ME, Lorna misses her older brothers like so many
little sisters who’ve been left behind, but Lorna’s brothers have not simply
left home to go to college or to get a job. They’ve both gone into the Army—one
to fight in an infantry battalion and one to work in the War Office in central
London, a city still under threat from German bombing—and there is no guarantee
that either of them will come home again. And in IN ANOTHER TIME, Maisie runs
away from home, not because she’s had a fight with her parents over her curfew
or an unsuitable boyfriend, but because she’s determined to do her bit for the
war effort, even though she’s only 17.
So, perhaps next time you read a historical novel, see if
you can spot these tricks-of-the-author’s-trade. See if you can spot where they
use historically accurate detail, not to lecture you, but to enhance your
understanding of a character’s life or the description of a scene. And look out
for when they turn your connection to the familiar on its head, by making that
mouth-watering cup of tea and cake not quite as delicious as you’d been
expecting.
Talking of cake, I’m fairly sure there’s a slice of some
fresh-egg, full-sugar sponge cake in my pantry, alongside a whole tin of
tea-bags. And since I’m not living in Maisie’s 1942 or in Lorna’s 1945, I’m
going to go put the kettle on.
Giveaway
Win a signed copy of IN ANOTHER TIME and a beautifully illustrated map of Scotland. Thanks to the author for providing the winnings. (International locations may enter.)
The Takei Family: 
Evalina and Taichi: 
Fourteen Teens from Japantown, San Francisco: 
Elise and Mariko: 
